Then, Monica receives a call. “Midnight, under the bridge,” says an unknown voice, “come alone.” An hour later, he’s there, under one end of the bridge looking towards the other. Monica meets Miguel Figueroa. He’s one of the few who yet count themselves among the members of the newly-formed popular front This meeting, carried out in secret, marks the beginning of a new step in our struggle. He passes her instructions; this has to be done in person because of the need for secrecy which no electronic communications can provide. For now, this is all the people of the new front task themselves with, ordinary men like Valeri concerning themselves by contrast with the minutiae of their own lives. While Monica will end up sacrificing herself for something much greater than herself, Valeri struggles against the little indignities that’ve come to characterize every day of his life. In the nights after the Worker’s Party and the People’s Party join forces, a simmering tension takes hold in the streets, imperceptible, but surely there. It’s as though the physical vessel of our world has become inhabited by some new essence, the secret act of two working class parties joining in union silently marking the moment our histories turn from one epoch to the next. In taking to the streets, Sean Morrison and the other students vent their rage, knowing as they do that their future is filled only with the unemployment and despair already dominating the lives of millions. But soon there will be a place in the popular front, training as they are to join its ranks whether they realize it or not. In the student hall at the polytechnic classes have been called off for the crisis gripping the streets, leaving Sean and Julia free to commit themselves to their own growing radicalism. They meet in secret, or so they think, speaking of the union of parties. “Will they help us?” Julia asks. “No one knows,” Sean says. “What will they do?” Julia asks. “They’re the only parties that want to free us from the wealthy man’s grip,” Sean says, “and that’s good enough for me.” The existence of the illegal parties is widely known in the working class blocks, but still it gives students like Sean and Julia a thrill to talk about them. Soon the name of the illegal parties will not thrill but will embolden them while striking fear into the hearts of the enemy. For now, though, Sean and Julia know the popular front will remain small, with few soldiers and fewer weapons. But in these troubled times, it’s the spirit, the essence of the illegal parties and their popular front that’s important. They’ve been working behind the scenes since the failed revolution fifteen years ago to make sure the next revolution won’t fail, and their time is almost at hand.
After having made it this far, we must always be careful to recognize we still have more to accomplish, that we’ve hardly taken our first step and still have a thousand and one left to take. News breaks that another law is set to go into force, signed in secret by the parliamentarian, to be released to the unsuspecting public only later, months later, perhaps even years later, by which time it’ll have become an immutable fact of life in the public discourse, with no legal challenge to stand a chance against the overwhelming political inertia. At Vanessa’s, this fighting and drinking and shouting leads, one night, to the inevitable. In the morning, her body’s taken to the nearest hospital’s morgue, while her husband’s taken in cuffs to the nearest jail. He’ll spend a few years locked up. Her daughters’ll spend the rest of their lives lost and confused. In the years to come, caught up in the disarray to follow they’ll hop from home to home, guardian to guardian, sometimes given off by someone who can no longer care for them, sometimes taken in after whoever’s been caring for them winds up killed, still sometimes picked up by some predator taking advantage of the chaos to prey on children innocent no more.
After the emergency measures fail to placate the working man and his natural allies, the student, parishioner, soldier, and migrant it seems something else might be on the horizon, some new scheme which could succeed in lulling the whole miserable lot of them into a false sense of security and in so lulling make them vulnerable to attack. But we want something more. We’ve always wanted something more. We reject, with full throated enthusiasm, the terms of the debate that’s been foisted upon us. Although we focus on events close to home, know that around the world tensions are on the rise. At any moment some little spark could ignite long-simmering tensions and set the world on fire. Men like Valeri have always been an afterthought in the wealthy man’s designs on hoarding more and more wealth, left to fend for themselves in a world overtly hostile to them. It’ll prove to be that the future must lie in men like him, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Some look out on those streets and see only a cobbled-together assortment of the same ragged and haggard men who must wander along each and every day as though in a trance, but that’s not what I see, not what you should see, only what the wealthy man would have us all see. At some point, there passes a moment when, like a switch, the whole lot of us come to realize we’ve been lied to, not in the basic, sort-of factual way we’ve always known we’ve been lied to but in a primitive, almost instinctive way that lends itself readily to the changing course of our shared future. At some point, there passes a moment when something in all of us changes, drastically and irrevocably, reconfiguring the way we look at the world but reshaping the way each of us thinks so we come to honestly believe this mew way of thinking has been our way all along. In his little bedroom with Sydney, Valeri feels a wave of relief wash over him as he plots his next move, the next move in his quest to become more than he is. It’s a strange sensation, to be so caught up in the passions of a revolutionary fervour that even the love of a woman can’t compare to the burning desire he has in him for justice and freedom. Even as Valeri thinks on this feeling, he knows it to be trite and adolescent to give himself over to self-denial, even as he fully understands it to be enlightening. Now’s the time, or at least as good a time as will come.
Reaching into his pocket, Valeri draws out a small box, handing it unopened to her. “Valeri,” she says, opening the box, a small gasp escaping her lips as she sees what he’s given her. But the only jewellery Valeri owns is a small pin given to him by his union in recognition of his years of service. It’s a small thing, but it means so much to him. It marks him as one of his own. He believes this is something someone like Sydney could never understand, not without having lived his life and felt all the things he’s felt in being made to feel shame for who he is. In the night, it starts to rain, a drop here, a drop there, soon the air crackling with the thousands and thousands of raindrops striking the pavement all at once. But in London’s working class districts men like Valeri have little time for indulgences like love. Even as they stand together, an unspoken understanding invades the moment, the grim knowledge they must not see each other again as lovers for all the need they have to commit themselves to their own respective struggles. Self-denial, Valeri’s come to believe, is the path forward, and he’s about to cast himself irrevocably into a place where she can’t follow. In the grim, grinding poverty that’s gripped London’s working class districts since even before the failed rising fifteen years ago, love is a luxury that must be cast by the wayside, and in the working man’s struggle for justice and freedom Valeri casts love by the wayside in the time it takes him and his lover to bid each other farewell. Soon enough, Valeri returns to his life as a day labourer, the thought lingering in the back of his mind that one day he’ll see Sydney again, a thought subversive, yet tempting.